#16
Despite his finicky and sensitive personality, people constantly approached him thanks to his looks—it was no different from a baby schema. Of course, Taeseong himself found the people hovering around him as annoying as flies swarming around fruit.
That’s how Taeseong grew up to be an excessively cynical person. While many were interested in him and approached him, they easily fell away after being embarrassed by Taeseong’s attitude. His parents worried about him not having a single close friend until he graduated high school.
His parents’ hope was the military. That place where all healthy Korean men go—the military inevitably required group living, and they had heard folk-tale-like stories from here and there about how someone’s child had gone to the military and come back mature. While they worried whether Taeseong would survive well in the vertical hierarchical relationships, they also had expectations that he might develop social skills through group living.
Taeseong enlisted after finishing his first semester of freshman year. Moving according to a set daily schedule wasn’t particularly difficult for him. He had also exercised consistently since childhood, so there were no physical problems. However, his social skills didn’t improve. Rather, Taeseong lost what little expectation he had for male peers his age. The only conversations exchanged while living in the same space with smelly buzz-cut guys who didn’t wash properly were crude and low-level content.
Only after gaining some seniority did Taeseong occasionally attack juniors who didn’t wash with flying kicks, but that level of behavior wasn’t a big problem within the military.
Seeing Taeseong discharge without any major incidents, his parents felt relieved. While he hadn’t developed social skills, at least he hadn’t been treated as a problem soldier, which meant he had done averagely well. Riding that momentum, they suggested he enter the dormitory.
Taeseong immediately refused and started living alone. He had looked for a place to live and finished moving in before his military leave even ended, but his worried parents visited at all hours. If they had set specific days and times to visit only during those scheduled hours each week, Taeseong would have been less stressed.
However, his parents always made surprise visits, worried that Taeseong might cause trouble. Fed up with this, Taeseong applied for dormitory housing as soon as his military leave ended. Not returning to his family home was due to his rebellious nature.
As a result, his parents got the outcome they wanted. Satisfied, they bought him a car instead of him entering the dormitory. There was also the concern that if Taeseong moved into the dormitory, they couldn’t predict how he would behave next. While Taeseong’s registered address was Seoul, he got into the dormitory thanks to maintaining excellent grades.
The first semester after entering the dormitory—the second semester of freshman year—went more smoothly than Taeseong had expected. This was because his roommate rarely came in, leaving Taeseong to monopolize the room.
His previous roommate seemed to be living at his girlfriend’s place. The roommate who occasionally came only to get clothes was caught by the dormitory administration at the end of the semester and kicked out. The dormitory where Taeseong stayed checked overnight stays by having students scan their access cards at the main gate instead of roll call, and the roommate’s friend had been caught scanning the card for him.
The second roommate he encountered was Bonoh. While Kim Bonoh couldn’t be called an exceptionally handsome man, he had a face that could draw favorable attention anywhere he went. When he smiled, his plump lips would stretch refreshingly to both sides, while conversely, the aegyo-sal under his eyes would protrude attractively. His genial appearance was exactly the kind that adults would like.
Seeing his slightly tanned, healthy-looking skin and the hint of mischief in his round eyes, Taeseong instinctively realized that Bonoh was a different type from himself. The kind of person who draws people together and mingles without reserve. Unlike himself, who chose to be an outsider, types that easily integrated into groups particularly didn’t mesh well with Taeseong. Somehow Taeseong felt his nerves on edge and became tense. It was probably because he was worried about future dormitory life. That’s what he assumed.
Taeseong’s premonition that they wouldn’t get along well as roommates was exactly right. On the first day of moving in, Bonoh sang while showering, and on the first day of classes, he came in drunk at dawn, disrupting Taeseong’s sleep. It was infuriating how he would come in noisily, wake everyone else up, but then fall asleep first once the lights were off.
The one consolation was that he didn’t snore. Taeseong had suffered all night from snoring sounds whenever his previous roommate occasionally came to sleep in the dormitory for unknown reasons—whether he had fought with his girlfriend or whatever. Bonoh slept making soft breathing sounds like an exhausted puppy that had run around excitedly all day and collapsed from fatigue. Every exhale carried the smell of alcohol.
The subtle spread of that refreshing alcohol scent and the unexpectedly gentle breathing sounds made Taeseong feel itchy somewhere. He even thought it might have been better if Bonoh had snored loudly. That night, in the dark room filled with Bonoh’s breathing sounds, Taeseong couldn’t fall asleep alone. He stayed awake all night with his eyes open, resolving that from tomorrow he absolutely had to fall asleep first.
Even after that, Bonoh continued to come in noisily at dawn, disrupting Taeseong’s sleep, and in the morning couldn’t wake up despite continuously ringing alarms. When showering, he would sing, and he would eat in the narrow room, making food smells reverberate.
Whenever he felt stressed, Taeseong would drive around. The car he received as compensation for dormitory life was a sleekly designed sedan. Sports cars with crude performance and only superficial style didn’t match Taeseong’s taste. Those who raced down roads with loud exhaust sounds were among the types Taeseong despised.
Taeseong liked driving around. The appeal was being able to move somewhere while disconnected from the outside world once inside a space covered in solid steel. Usually, random thoughts would be erased while driving, but sometimes that didn’t work either.
Recently, Taeseong was getting headaches because of Kim Bonoh, who had the biggest presence in his daily life. While Bonoh’s emotions showed clearly on his face in an easy-to-read way, he sometimes wore expressions as if lost in thought. When that happened, Taeseong would become subtly anxious, wondering what he was scheming this time. He wanted to open his head and see what on earth he was thinking.
While thinking about Kim Bonoh, soft breathing sounds crept in between the jazz piano improvisations playing on the car stereo. The breathing sounds he heard every night seemed to stick to his eardrums and wouldn’t be erased. Taeseong wanted to wash out his ears before those breathing sounds made his daily life irreversibly chaotic. He had resolved that as soon as he caught him in the act, he would run to the dormitory administration and request a roommate change again.
But even though he had caught him in the act, he couldn’t actually catch Bonoh. Not enough time had passed for vacancies to open up, and even if vacancies did arise, there would be people who had received dormitory waiting numbers earlier. In such a situation, he couldn’t just insist on his own will. However, he couldn’t just back down like this either. To endure Kim Bonoh’s breathing sounds that kept echoing like auditory hallucinations, he had to at least extract some rules for smooth dormitory life to make it cost-effective.
What was most unexpected here was that Kim Bonoh tried hard to follow the rules that Taeseong had unilaterally created. While it was clearly visible that he was struggling to keep up, grumbling with his mouth but following well with his body.
It didn’t even stop there. Bonoh had a ghost-like ability to know when others were vulnerable and would persistently dig in. While Taeseong knew he had a smooth personality that was good at winning everyone’s favor, he had definitely only thought about avoiding him when they first met. This meant he never thought that Taeseong would be included in that “everyone.”
“That is, I mean…”
When they established the dormitory rules, Bonoh had muttered to Taeseong about being a genius negotiator or a born ruthless politician, but Taeseong had only snorted. It was natural. Bonoh wouldn’t know how much Taeseong had endured to live with him, someone who hadn’t learned anything about living with others.
Those few written rules were like Taeseong’s safety net. At that time, he never knew that Bonoh would penetrate that safety net in an unimaginable way. Who on earth would do such a thing in a room shared with a roommate? Especially if that roommate’s mood had just barely softened, it was even more unthinkable.
What’s the point of filthy porn in a space shared with others when you’re not some inferior beast, and why make him know even things he didn’t want to know by specifically talking about your preferences? Taeseong could have mocked him with all sorts of words right away. However, he couldn’t.
“It’s not like I wanted to watch it…”
Because the sight of Bonoh, not knowing how to make excuses, turning completely red all over while only rolling his clear eyes, made Taeseong’s heart flutter for a moment. His slightly drooping eyebrows, the way he licked his lips as if troubled—it all entered his eyes and stuck there.
“I, I’m going to the bathroom!”
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
